1000 Words Photography Magazine #9

We are delighted to announce that the Autumn issue of 1000 Words “Transformation” is now online. To view it please go to www.1000wordsmag.com















We start off this issue with Curator of photography at Tate Simon Baker’s review of Double Bind, an extraordinary installation of a new body of work from Leigh Ledare as seen at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France this summer. There is also an interview with Andrew Bruce, a recent graduate from the University of Creative Arts in Farnham, and an essay on another exciting talent to emerge from the UK in the last few years, Melinda Gibson. Louise Clements writes about Berlin-based photographer Isabelle Graeff, and The Telegraph’s Photography critic-cum-picture editor Lucy Davies offers her thoughts on The Flesh and The Spirit, the latest Sally Mann photobook which will be published by Aperture in November. Finally, 1000 Words Deputy editor Michael Grieve reviews Trevor Paglen’s first photographic monograph, Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, also from Aperture.

In the books section, we cover Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids and Coming Up For Air by Stephen Gill. The range of photographers in this issue is eclectic and amazing. At a time when photography is becoming increasingly vapid and predictable, 1000 Words hopes to provide some precious insight in to the best work that is being produced today.

As always, thanks to all the artists, writers and advertisers, and we would like to express our deep gratitude to Santiago Taccetti of CCCH Creative Studio, Barcelona for his wonderful design work on the magazine.

Many thanks and best wishes,

Tim

Charlie Rose: A conversation with Sally Mann

Ahead of Sally Mann´s big opening tomorrow at The Photographers´ Gallery here in London (see previous post) 1000 Words revisits a classic interview from 2003 with Charlie Rose. Enjoy.

First UK solo show for Sally Mann at The Photographers´ Gallery

© Sally Mann

Sally Mann, The Family and the Land
The Photographers´ Gallery
18 June – 19 September 2010

This exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery will be the American photographer Sally Mann’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Combining several series from her long photographic career, The Family and the Land: Sally Mann will reflect Mann’s artistic impulse to draw on the world around her as subject matter.

The ‘family’ element of the title will comprise Mann’s early series Immediate Family and the newer series Faces, both of which depict her children at various ages. The two series Motherland: Virginia and Deep South represent the landscape, portraying images made across the south of the United States. The more recent body of work, What Remains brings together both strands of the exhibition, through its examination of how bodies, as they decompose, merge into the land itself.

Sally Mann (b.1951, USA) first gained prominence for Immediate Family (1984–94) a series of intimate and revealing portraits of her three young children, Emmet, Jesse and Virginia. Taken over a ten-year period, Mann depicts them playing, swimming and acting to the camera in and around their homestead in Lexington, Virginia. Born out of a collaborative process between mother and child, the work encapsulates their childhood in all its rawness and innocence.

Mann followed Immediate Family by focusing on the land itself in her series Motherland: Virginia (1993–94) and Deep South (1996–98). Here she is drawn to locations steeped in historical significance from the American Civil War, which left both literal and metaphoric scars on the trees and the land itself. Using antique cameras and processes throughout, Mann accentuates the sense of age in the subject while embracing the imperfect effects created by her printing process.

The most recent series in the exhibition, What Remains (2000–04) seeks to further connect human contact to the land and how the body eventually returns to and becomes a part of the land itself. This concept led Mann to photograph decomposing cadavers at the University of Tennesse Anthropological Research Facility, Knoxville, where human decomposition is studied in a variety of, mainly outdoor, settings. What Remains deals directly with the subject of death, still a social taboo. As with her other work, Mann’s subjects are sensitively handled and beautifully realised, encouraging us to reflect upon our own mortality and place within nature’s order.

The Family and the Land: Sally Mann at The Photographers’ Gallery is an edited version of a touring exhibition, conceived by Sally Mann in collaboration with Hasse Persson, Director, Borås Museum of Modern Art, Sweden. It has been presented at Fotomuseum Den Hague and the Musée de l‘Elysée, Lausanne as well as in Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Helsingborg, and Copenhagen.